Wednesday, 1 October 2014

Evaluation for Final Piece

Over the time span of 6 months we have been focusing our photography project on transform photography and in this time looked at a wide variety of different artists. This includes studying the work of Claes Odenburg, Miguel Vallinas and Ulric Collette.
  When gathering research and ideas to go towards my final piece, I found Ulric Collette, a Canadian photographer whose work inspired my final piece greatly. I found the subject of his generic photos very interesting and the actual techniques he used enabled the final product to look seamless.  Although it wasn't his work that gave me the first idea for my final piece (that was a different artists work whose name I am unaware of), Collettes work strengthened my own ideas and worked more in the way I intended to.  I didn't want to mimic his work exactly, so I was almost pleased when I realised how much I disliked the colours and moods of his photos because this meant there was something I could take and improve upon on my own to recreate his ideas in a way more preferable to me.
  After I’d done this initial research into the work of other people, I did a couple of sketches to look further into facial features and some ideas I had to attempt to strengthen the idea I had in my head for my final piece. This helped me to think more about what I was doing and create a more developed piece of work, rather than create the first thing that came to mind.
  During this project we carried out a number of photo-shoots and experiments as a class as part of our research into the topic ‘Transform’ and to later on give us ideas for our final piece.
  One of the first experiments we did was in the style of Claes Odenburg, we used different foods and small objects to create scenes which we would later manipulate on Photoshop to add images of ourselves. This would create an almost tilt shift effect.
  We also visited the zoo at one stage to collect images to try and recreate some of Miguel Vallinas’ work. This was a great opportunity and allowed us to experiment on Photoshop without having to take any images from the internet without permission.
  As well as experimenting in photo-shoots, we researched a few new techniques to use on Photoshop to create some new and interesting images. In my opinion, this was great fun and really taught us a lot about things like layers and mask layers.  We also improved upon techniques we’d used previously like the clone, burn and lasso tool. These came in useful and I ended up using all three tools when creating my final piece.
  As well as using the aforementioned tools, when creating my final piece I took the photos in raw which enabled me to open them in the raw editor on Photoshop and get the best results out of it. For example, I severely altered the clarity, temperature and contrast of the photos, which becomes quite clear when you look at the original and edited ones next to each other. I wanted my final photos to be as striking as possible so I altered the highlights and shadows to get the results I wanted and then ever so slightly altered the hue to make the photos appear more red and blue, almost as if every vein in the subjects body was visible.

I had 3 original ideas before settling on which one I was going to do but it was a pretty easy decision as I wasn't too keen on my other ideas and felt they didn't fully relate to the theme of the exam. One of the ideas I had was to transform a girl's hood into the head of a wolf, I thought that this idea could look pretty cool and I even continued to take photos linking to this idea in my final photo-shoot but in the end I dropped it, feeling as though my other idea followed the brief a lot more.
  The other unused idea I had was actually the one that sparked the idea for my eventual final piece. It was simply a face facing forward merging into the same face but facing sideways. As with the previous idea, it showed transform but only very loosely. However, the idea of two faces merging together made me start to think about two different faces merged together and then incorporating ageing into the piece as we had previously talked about in the project.

I took the photos for my final piece in my own time rather than at school because I prefer to use the backdrops and lenses I keep at home. To take the photos I used an umbrella light kit, an 18-55mm lens, a tripod and a stool. The tripod was used so that I could have more freedom with the exposure without having to worry as much about the photos blurring. I also used it when taking the photos of myself.
  I chose two of the photos from my photo shoot and edited them on Photoshop separately, focusing especially on the colours, hues and contrasts. I wanted the photos to seem natural but unnatural at the same time. For example, the reds a little too red, the blues a little too blue. To do this I put a very slight hue filter on and manipulated the brightness, shadows, temperatures and saturations of the photos. After editing the two separate images I used mainly the lasso and clone tool to merge the two faces together, as well as incorporating some of the things we'd learnt about layers previously over the course of this project. When I'd gotten the picture right, I edited it so it was almost the opposite of the two individual pictures. This meant making it warm and gritty rather that cold and sharp. Using golds rather than blues and reds.
  I presented my final piece by mounting them in frames I had specially made for me by my dad. Together, we made sure that the frames represented the person in them, so because I am younger than he, my frame was newer and smoother than his side which was slightly rougher and worn. All three frames were then mounted together using more wood.
  I think that when you look over my blog and then at my final piece, it's very clear what my inspiration was. Although I have very much made it my own, you can see where my ideas stemmed from and what I took from them to include in my own work.
  After my final piece was completed, I was surprisingly pleased with the actual success of the merge of the two faces. Of course it's not perfect but a lot of it is really down to a matter of preference and I'm quite pleased with how the photos turned out. I also think the colours of all three photographs contrast a lot and therefore in a strange way, compliment each other.
  As I was creating my final piece, my ideas for presenting the work changed quite a lot. I always wanted them framed but the positioning and what else to include other than the main picture was never set in stone, though I'm glad I chose the option I did in the end.
For our next project, I'd like to spend more time partaking in photo-shoots so I have more material to use and hopefully more ideas will be generated from the recreations of other artists' work I make from my shoots.

Saturday, 27 September 2014

Final Piece photos

This was originally my final piece and after completing the editing I was happy with it for a while. However, after looking at it and checking it over time and time again I began to realise some areas that were beginning to annoy me a lot. For example, the shoulder on the right of the photo is a lot higher than the right and despite this being the original proportions of the picture, I thought it looked very odd. Secondly: the hair. It was very difficult to merge the two photos but the hair was definitely the most difficult aspect. Trying to make long hair on a hairless head look natural is a lot harder than first expected. After a while I gave in and decided to try and sort things out a little bit.


To adjust the shoulder, I added a new layer, cut it out, moved it down and then used the clone tool to blacken where the shoulder would have been previously. I then used the blur, sharpen and burn tool to try and remove any unnatural looking areas. With the hair, I decided to add a little bit more so that it fell more naturally instead of simply disappearing. I'm quite pleased with the final result now that I've altered the areas which were getting on my nerves.
The sketch I based my photo on from my ideas
and intentions.

Edited photos from final piece photo shoot

The photo on the left nicely follows one of the sketches I did for my ideas and intentions entry. I liked the gradient of colours in the hair and after editing, I was even more pleased because the shadows and darker areas which I darkened further with the burn tool really brought out the contrasting lightness which I highlighted with the dodge tool. One of the things I don't like about this photo is how the nose is out of focus. It looks a lot like an accident and decreases my like for the photo. I probably will not take this piece any further.









I was pleased with the quality of these photos and the similarity of positions. My idea is to merge the two faces together and to do that the faces need to be at similar angles and proportions so I chose these two. No only that but the fact that they are looking down makes it slightly more interesting than a straight forward portrait, in my opinion. The colours do look quite bland though so I chose to edit them quite a lot by altering the temperature, to make them a little bit colder but when put together with the increase in contrast you can really see the red in the skin which makes the photos look quite raw yet enriched with colour without having a crazy hue. I am pleased with these photos, even though they're quite simple they do show aspects of rule of thirds and look quite interesting. I'm going to use these two photos to create my final piece.

Photo Shoot for Final Piece (unedited)

I took these photos using a Canon 1100d with an 18-55mm lens. In order to get the right lighting, I used an umbrella light kit and switched between gold and silver sheets held up to experiment slightly with the warmth and tint of the photos. To take the photos of myself, I used a tripod and put the camera on a 10 second timer.